Congratulations to Christin Burd whose grant entitled "Molecular mechanisms of allele-specific NRAS signaling and tumorigenesis" was recently funded by the NIH. We have known for decades that RAS mutations drive up to a quarter of all cancers and that each tumor type is enriched for a specific set of RAS variants. This proposal will define the properties of RAS mutants required to initiate melanoma and test whether interventions that block these pathways can prevent tumor formation.

This builds on prior work from the Burd lab that was funded by a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award. Lianbo Yu (Research Assistant Professor in Biostatistics) and Rachel Belote (new assistant professor in Molecular Genetics) serve as co-investigators.